Yacob
Williams sees art as a means to inspire, uplift and unify
his community

On
a cold, sunny Friday afternoon on North Swan Street in Albany’s
Arbor Hill, artist Yacob Williams walks across a field of
crunchy snow to show his work to an out-of-town friend. The
mural artist has, with community support, created a series
of works meant to spark renewal on these notorious blocks—the
same area where drug dealers once lined both sides of the
street, and customers from the suburbs lined up daily, as
if it were a fast-food drive-through.

Tucked
away on a building just around the corner from where their
car is parked, on Ten Broeck Place, is Williams’ haunting
evocation of Mother Africa. This is the bright bit of color
on that gray corner. On the west side of North Swan itself,
there’s another mural depicting a group of people joined together
under the words “United We Stand,” and another work at the
end of the block, on a structure at the corner of North Swan
and Livingston Avenue. Returning south on North Swan, between
Ten Broeck Place and Second Street, is Williams’ grandest
work in terms of both scale and impact: a luminous image of
a black angel, painted on the side of an equally grand-scale
19th-century brick building. Words of peace, contributed by
children, are inscribed on the wall below and to the left
of the angel. Facing a vacant lot—one of many that mar the
streetscape in this old Albany neighborhood—the angel is a
beautiful and hopeful vision on a weary thoroughfare in desperate
need of beauty and hope.

As his friend clicks away, taking photographs of the angel,
Williams recounts the recent, tumultuous history of this now-quiet
street. It’s a story of open drug markets, violence and murder—and
a subsequent botched attempt by the city to forge a revitalization
plan without, many argue, properly listening to the wishes
of the residents. Despite this, Williams prefers to focus
on the positive, scouting out possible locations for additional
murals, and speaking in glowing terms about the community
involvement behind his public art.

Later, at his Livingston Avenue home, Williams explains how
the mural project came to be. Helen Black, president of the
Ten Broeck Triangle Preservation League, had the original
idea of creating murals on North Swan Street. Black brought
the idea to Isla Roona, restorative justice community coordinator
for the Albany group Social Capital Development Corporation.
“It is hard to recall exactly when we began discussing the
development of the murals,” remembers Roona, “but my first
conversations were definitely with her.” Black and Roona discussed
the idea with Williams; as their original press release explained,
the three knew each other through community meetings and neighborhood
social events. A partnership was created.

Roona sees a direct connection between her work with restorative
justice—in which the victims of crime meet with the perpetrators
to work out an alternative punishment as a means towards healing
and understanding—and the effect these murals can have on
the neighborhood. She explains: “Restorative justice is about
repairing the harm on the individual, group, community and
societal levels. Public art helps repair at the community
level. . . . [It] can be utilized to pull youth and young
adults off the streets, particularly those that may be getting
in trouble with the law, and get them involved in neighborhood
beautification through the arts and hook them into needed
services.”

Roona notes that the idea behind the North Swan Street mural
project is along the same lines as a successful program begun
in Philadelphia in 1984 by then-Mayor Wilson Goode. The original
idea grew out of the desire to eliminate graffiti by redirecting
the talents of “tag” artists in a positive direction. A formal
program, backed by the city and intimately involving the community,
now offers free art workshops, tutoring, and apprenticeships
with local artists for at-risk youth. As Jane Golden, one
of the original artists behind the Philadelphia program, told
ABC News on July 28: “Murals often become a catalyst for positive
social change. We do a mural and then people start thinking
maybe we can turn this into a garden, we could sweep the streets.”

This is also the aim of the folks behind the murals in Arbor
Hill. They work as a team: Roona is in charge of raising funds
and securing the support of local businesses and anonymous
donors. Black sees that the permissions and paperwork are
taken care of. Both have put in countless hours on the project.
“Isla sacrificed a lot, Helen Black sacrificed a lot,” Yacob
Williams says.

As for his own efforts, Williams keeps a careful tally. “It
took me [more than] 240 hours to complete the murals,” Williams
notes. “There was a lot of stuff I didn’t anticipate. . .
. In one week I put 80 hours in, and my coworkers put 70 hours
in—that’s 150 hours of work [just] from Aug. 9 though Aug.
17.”

An Angel over Arbor Hill: one
of the North Swan Street murals. Photo by John
Whipple

The
concepts for the mural themes came from Albany city school
students. “We had a block party at which we chose the top
four contestants from the school district, and working with
them, chose the themes [for the murals],” Williams notes.
Then the proposals had to be put in front of the city of Albany’s
Historic Resources Commission for approval. Williams laughs,
remembering the moment: “I must say that when they saw the
illustration I did of the black angel, the whole room went
quiet. And [later] when they saw the final product, they were
impressed. Everybody was stunned when they saw that black
angel.”

Working with students, like those who participated in the
mural project, is deeply important to Williams. It relates
to the future work he wants to do with at-risk inner-city
youth, and relates back to the guidance and help he received
as a young man. “I grew up in the Gloversville Enlarged School
District,” he explains. “I knew I wanted to be an artist since
I was like 5 years old. The interesting thing about Gloversville
is that even though the black population is a minority, I
felt like we got a very good quality education.”

In those days, Gloversville had a thriving industrial sector,
which helped provide a solid tax base to support public education.
It was the 1960s, and Williams remembers his time there with
fondness.

He tells about the moment he recognized what he wanted to
do: “When I was 5 years old, in the first grade, [the school]
had an open house, which was how I knew I had talent. Me being
a short little kid, you know what I’m saying. . . . I saw
this whole group of people, like in a movie theater, all crowded
around looking at something on the other side of the room.
So I had to try to get through that, through skirts and legs
and all that, to see what they were looking at. They were
looking at a picture I had colored of a swan.”

The school recognized what he was capable of. Williams remembers
with pride, “Not that my head got big, but the teachers always
told me that they could tell that the way I used my imagination,
interacted with other people, and played with toys, that I
was imaginative and creative. . . . Then once they could see
me draw, they definitely identified me, by the age of 9 or
10, as being talented and gifted.” The result went beyond
the usual tracking into more advanced classes. Williams was
actively mentored: “As a matter of fact, for at least two
years—fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade—every other week
I would get out of school an hour and a half early. Mr. Frizell,
who was my art teacher and mentor and friend, and who passed
away two years ago, lived out in the country. We’d go out
to his studio, and I’d work side-by-side with him painting.”

Williams stresses the importance of this learning style: “It’s
very important for the students to work along artists while
they’re working, because they’re gonna be picking up things
that you may not realize. I think they learn a lot from observing.”

Williams graduated from Gloversville and went on to SUNY New
Paltz, where he majored in black studies and fine arts. There,
he was shocked to find an approach to teaching art that was
antithetical to all of his previous experiences. “There was
no warmth, no sensitivity,” he says. “It [was] like cold academic
instruction: ‘Do this.’ ”

Confronted with a seemingly arbitrary system in which goals
and objectives were not clearly spelled out, and within which
there was no way to guess the criteria used for evaluating
and grading his work, Williams began to feel alienated and
disillusioned. He lacked confidence in his professors’ abilities
as well: “To have a teacher teach you about art, and never
see them producing art themselves, leaves a lot to be desired.
. . . You don’t know if the guy’s a quack or what.”

Williams claims there were other problems as well—related
to race and religion. “I really should have left New Paltz,”
he muses. “They tried to fight down the black studies department.”
Williams quit a program in arts education over the hostile
reaction to his dreadlocks. The art department, he says, was
equally insensitive. In 1978, when Williams wanted to attend
an international arts conference in Senegal, and asked the
head of the department about earning credit for the experience,
the reaction of the department chair was negative and blunt:
“The first thing that came out of his mouth was, ‘What do
you want to go to Africa for?’ ” As Williams remembers it,
the art department was not willing to acknowledge, let alone
validate, the African- American experience.

Williams looks back at that time with some regret. “I wasted
a lot of time and wasted a lot of money there,” he says, but
then explains how he turned this into something positive.
“I decided that life was gonna be my teacher, my school, and
that God was gonna be my teacher. . . . I had to deprogram
myself from all the negative bullshit they taught me.” Summing
up those years, Williams affirms the place spirituality has
in his life: “Can’t leave out God. . . . I’m a person who’s
very spiritual, and have overcome a lot. What I’ve been through
has made me stronger.”

A
positive image: the Livingston Avenue mural. Photo
by John Whipple

As
numerous artists and musicians will attest, making art pay
is a difficult proposition. Williams did his time in the wilderness,
making a livelihood in the human-services field. While he
never stopped making art, Williams spent more than a decade
working for agencies dealing with brain-injury victims, the
developmentally disabled, and the mentally challenged. He
has a music degree, but he never earned a degree in social
work—and so, inevitably, hit a glass ceiling in the profession.
Also, he remembers, many employers were reluctant to place
him in more visible positions because of his dreads. Finally,
three years ago, Williams decided to strike out on his own.
“I realized that as long as I was working for somebody else,”
he explains, “I wasn’t gonna have that energy left over to
do what I gotta do.”

The first year, he says, was difficult. Williams had to learn
how to market himself while facing the difficulties of raising
two teenage sons. He was determined, however, to be “audacious
and persistent” in the quest to make a name and career for
himself. In the last year, he says, he has started to reap
the benefits of that effort.

Now, he is working with Roona on a project to open a cultural-and-arts
center in Arbor Hill, based on the hands-on type of learning
by example that served him so well growing up. (A method,
he argues, that has more in common with African rather than
Western learning traditions.) And, Williams says, the need
for such a place is clearly evident: “An African arts-and-cultural
center is really needed. We’re a neglected race, a neglected
people. We don’t have time to wait, to debate. We’re taking
responsibility in our own hands, through the grass roots.
. . . [We want to] take the kids off the streets, and help
them identify the talents they have within themselves.”

It’s an ambitious vision, based on the idea of the arts as
an empowering and transformational force. Williams sums up
his faith this way: “Art sets people free, you know, helps
you create beautiful things. That’s why I’m trying to take
my philosophy and incorporate it into an arts-and- cultural
center. I personally feel that God knows I’m talented, that
I have something to offer the community.”